Provably Secure and Lightweight Certificateless Signature Scheme for IIoT Environments

In recent years, two technologies, the cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), have a synergistic effect in the modern organizations as digitization is a new business trend for various industries. Therefore, many organizations outsource their crowdsourced industrial-IoT (IIoT) data in the cloud system to reduce data management overhead. However, data authentication is one of the fundamental security/trust requirements in such IIoT network. The certificateless signature (CLS) scheme is a cryptographic primitive that provides data authenticity in IIoT systems. Recently, CLS has become a prime research focus due to its ability to solve the key-escrow problem in a very recent identity-based signature technique. Many CLS schemes have already been developed using map-to-point (MTP) hash function and random oracle model (ROM). However, due to the implementation difficulty and probabilistic nature of MTP function and ROM, those CLSs are impractical. Hence, the development of a CLS for lightweight devices mounted in IIoT has become one of the most focused research trends. This paper presents a new pairing-based CLS scheme without MTP function and ROM. The new CLS scheme is secure against both the Type-I and Type-II adversaries under the hardness of extended bilinear strong Diffie–Hellman (BSDH) and BSDH assumptions, respectively. Performance evaluation and comparison proves that our scheme outperforms other CLS schemes.